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Andy’s Quick Hits (148): More Autonomy Boosts Productivity and Customer Satisfaction
Don’t we already know that autonomy is good thing in business?
Yes, there is a lot to suggest this is the case. But this study was particularly impressive!
How impressive?
Well, the research by Narayan Ramasubbu and Indranil R. Bardhan tracked productivity and customer satisfaction on 461 software development projects over five years in real-world situations i.e. in a large software development company.
Oh wow so real, real-world data!
Precisely - the nature of research is that it is difficult to set up such research projects and particularly over such long-time periods and to compare this in-house to project teams that don’t have the same conditions.
So how did they do this?
This was in a company that had 125,000 software developers around the world working on projects that adhered to an ideal operations profile closely monitored through a central unit.
Managers on 146 projects were given autonomy to design their projects the way they wanted using three main controls: location and time differences among team members, level of process diversity (such as lean or structured), and level of managerial control.
